The Content Factory
how we mine our minds to create a book
Every time we publish a book, like we did this week, we get lots of questions about our creative process. Since so many of y’all have asked, this week we thought we’d walk you through the madness we endure when we buckle down and get to work. We broke it down into 4 easy steps.
1. First, create some kind of outline.
Counter initiatively, we begin by brainstorming what we want the tone of the book to be. The vibe. The visual story we are telling with the food. We put together a mood board of images, songs, pictures of food, until we get our inspo-Frankenstein of just right. That’s our first outline.
We want readers to be left with a specific feeling after they’re done flipping through the pages. Like they just hung out with a forgotten friend or drove down their favorite street. Once we’ve nailed down the vibe, we keep honing it until we’re only hitting harmonious notes with each new image.
In our first book, we wanted readers to feel like they were visiting LA for the first time but staying with a broke friend. Party Grub we wanted to feel like a fun- not intimidating- house party where everyone pitched in and cooked. Fast as Fuck was a road trip through California from dawn to long after dusk. We know that a large portion of people who buy our books will only cook from them infrequently, if at all. That means the first, and likely only, chance we have to grab people’s attention is with our visuals.
We don’t want to be forgettable. Most cookbooks in the last 10 years have all decided to look like Kinfolk knock-offs. They all bleed together in our mind. We want our food to stand out. But you eat with your eyes first, right?
2. Write recipes based on what you actually eat.
Michelle keeps notebooks about what she is cooking, dish ideas, and great meals that we’ve both had out in the world. She was doing this LONG before we got our cookbook deal. Just a classic food weirdo. You can look back to notebooks from years ago to find the beginnings of dishes that went on to grace the covers of our books after she started testing them.
When it's time to begin a cookbook, we start flipping through her notebooks and pull out the standout dishes. From there, we find a thread in the food, fleshing it out so that the book has some kind of culinary theme or core ingredients list. Something in the food has to all tie together otherwise wtf is the point. In Fast as Fuck, the food is all supposed to be easy and quick to throw together, obviously. In Brave New Meal, all the recipes are a little more decadent to show that you can have indulgent and surprising flavors at home without grabbing takeout.
Once we get a little list going we start looking for holes -not enough breakfast dishes, too much rice, not enough beans- and then start creating recipes to fill out the manuscript while making it more cohesive. This process takes a long time and things constantly get shoved around and reshaped as the months go by.
3. Be obsessed.
We think about our work constantly. We work, we go home, then we get up and go right back to work again. We do sink after sink of dishes and load up our neighbor’s fridges with all the food we test but can’t possibly eat all by ourselves. We lose sleep, lose friends, lose relationships because we don’t know how to stop. Our brains are always humming along in the background; eyes not quite focus on the work at hand. Tasks pile up and chapters get rewritten. Matt dreams up new lighting setups so we reshoot old dishes. Michelle thinks we suddenly have too many pasta recipes so she starts reorganizing the book and making cuts. If we let up for even a second, our work won’t be good enough. It never feels good enough.
But when you write a book, there’s a team at your publisher who you talk with infrequently and rarely, if ever, meet in person. They’ll give you copy edits and create the layout. You can only hope that they care as much about the project as you do. It might be your baby, but it’s never theirs so they punt the ball where sometimes you’d wish they’d throw a Hail Mary. So much of the process is faith.
Then eventually we have to let go. We stop tweaking, reshooting, rereading, and the book heads to the printer. We wait and this is the hardest part. We come up with plans to promote it, wishing for a budget that we’ll never get. Waiting to hear if anyone wants to interview us, waiting to see how the pages look on paper since we only ever see them on a screen. We wait to hear if there’s a chance to tell the world about our work. Sometimes we get to go on tv, sometimes we can only book radio shows, sometimes there’s nothing. We pour ourselves onto each page and then wait. All we can do is hope that someone will notice our work and give us a platform to talk about it. Or that people will like an image we share on social media enough to spend some of their hard earned money on our book. Hope is hard.
We have to hope that it’s a slow news day when the book comes out. We have to hope that we aren’t competing with a Food Network star. Hope that the first comments are nice. Hope that we’re strong enough not to read the comments. Hope that there’s not a printing error. Hope that people respond to the recipes and visuals we dreamed up years ago. Hope that we can get through this all again. The Content Factory runs on hope, faith, and effort. If you’re gonna write a cookbook you’ve got to give it all you've got.
4. Grow your social following.
This is all anyone cares about. If you don’t have an audience already no publisher will sign you. They want their job to be as easy as possible. We all do.
Thanks so much for supporting us here in The Broiler Room. We promise we’ll stop talking about the new book soon. We’re just super proud parents and we appreciate you indulging the fuck out of us.
As a thank you for your support, we are giving away 20 prints, numbered and signed, from our book Brave New Meal to subscribers of The Broiler Room. Yes, that’s right, the beautiful still lifes and cover shot will be getting professionally printed and matted for a lucky few. But you, our most precious supporters, get entered twice. Straight velvet rope stuff right there. We’ll be emailing the winners at the end of next week so spread the word if you know other people with great taste like you.
Thank you again for sharing your Sundays with our dumbasses. See you in the kitchen next week.
Michelle and Matt